Sierra Club
Organizational Effectiveness Governance Committee Chair Greg Casini and Executive Director Carl Pope is an initial briefing on a new organizing initiative which the Board has embraced -- testing the model for creating a truly community or neighborhood presence for the Sierra Club in those areas where we have the greatest volunteer potential. Engaging our Community Teams” Strategy BACKGROUND In 2003, the Sierra Club began an exciting new exploration in grass-roots community organizing: Building Environmental Community. Building Environmental Community is based on a simple idea: Americans can only protect their environment by connecting to their friends and neighbors. The Sierra Club can best carry out its mission by recruiting thousands of volunteers to build those community networks. Relying on the media to create citizen action just doesn’t work well enough; it doesn’t motivate people strongly enough; it doesn’t transform public support, which environmental issues already have, into public demand, which is what it takes to move our society. Building Environmental Community resembled its predecessor, the Environmental Public Education Campaign (EPEC). Like EPEC, it involved placing organizers on the ground in local communities. Like EPEC it was based on organizing around a local issues selected by local people as being important to the community. Like EPEC it involved recruiting as many new volunteers as possible. A great many chapters and groups have had positive experience with EPEC, and know how it works. But there are a couple of key differences between EPEC and Building Environmental Community. First, in the traditional EPEC program the main way of communicating with the public about the local environmental issue was the media, supplemented with one to one, neighbor to neighbor communications. In Building Environmental Community, the main way of communicating about our issue is one on one – house parties, rallies, community walks and meetings, phone banks. Media is a supplement to help broaden public awareness. Second, Building Environmental Community is much more volunteer intensive than EPEC, because most of the communicating is being done by volunteers directly, rather than indirectly through the media. So in a limited number of cities, the Building Environmental Community program involved placing 2-3 organizers, where the traditional EPEC model involved only a single organizer. Similarly, in Building Environmental Community sites, the organizers are spending much more of their time identifying, recruiting, training and supporting volunteers, and much less working with the media on an issue. After two years to testing Building Environmental Community, the exciting news is that this approach generates a tremendous increase in potential volunteers. It turns out that if we ask in the right way, provide the right training and support, provide meaningful opportunities to take action with their neighbors, and engage our neighbors around the right local environmental issue, in medium sized cities it is possible to recruit hundreds, in some cases more than a 1000, volunteers interested in reaching out to their friends and neighbors. In Portland, Oregon, the Portland Group added 965 new volunteers during 2004. In Philadelphia, the Eastern Pennsylvania Group of the Pennsylvania chapter recruited 1046 new volunteers. In Oakland County Michigan the Sierra Club found 750 new grass-roots activists. In Las Vegas, Nevada, the Toiyabe Chapter added 491. GOING FORWARD But with this exciting success came a challenge, a question, and a vision. The challenge was to keep these new volunteers involved and engaged. The question was how to make as many of them as possible leaders who could recruit new volunteers. The vision was how to respond to this challenge in a way that, potentially, would allow chapters and groups that were not part of the Building Environmental Community program to develop new strength and capacity. The Board of Directors, in its February 2003 meeting when it first committed the Club to the Building Environmental Community concept, recognized that for the Club to succeed in creating the kind of neighbor to neighbor environmental sentiment we needed, there would need to be some kind of organized Sierra Club activity at the neighborhood level. If we wanted to have thousands, and eventually tens of thousands, of Sierra Club volunteers, there needed to be some way for people to be active on behalf of the Club’s mission in their own communities and with their own friends and neighbors. In some places, where Groups are truly local, we already have that. But in metropolitan areas where the Group covers dozens of neighborhoods or communities, or in states where a Group may be spread out over three or four smaller cities, there is no regular forum for truly local, neighborhood activity around the specific concerns and issues facing that community. The Board recognized when it launched the BEC effort that the Club, to carry it out, would eventually need a more local presence than it had in most places. We have been talking with many of the volunteers who worked on the BEC campaigns since December of last year about this challenge, asking them what worked about BEC, what didn’t work as well, how they would like to be involved with the Club in the future, Scott Elkins of the North Star Chapter headed up a group that evaluated the issues involved in integrating the kind of one to one contact that is the focus of the BEC effort with our traditional Chapter and Group committees and excoms. Our summary conclusion from Scott’s Task Force: “If we build it they will come.” We are finding more people than ever willing to volunteer for small, discrete, well organized and meaningful tasks which help move forward our local campaigns -- three hours on a volunteer phone bank, two hours going door to door. These are not our “traditional” volunteers who assume an on-going leadership position. But they are willing to give a couple of hours on a regular basis if the task if fun and meaningful – and many of them will then give more as they grow their leadership skills, their community networks and their confidence and commitment. At its May retreat the Board concluded that it was time to begin testing some specific responses to this question and challenge, and finding out how the Sierra Club could best engage and involve volunteers in working on behalf of the Club’s mission in their own neighborhoods. It asked the Organizational Effectiveness Committee to work with the BEC Campaign Committee to develop and test models of how the Sierra Club could provide a regular presence at the neighborhood level. At the July meeting it reviewed some of the early ideas emerging from this conversation and decided to move forward, and gave this new project the working title, “Engaging our Community Teams.” It emphasized that the goals of the project were to empower much larger numbers of volunteers to work on behalf of the Club’s mission, to build the power of the Club at the neighborhood and community level, and to enable the Club to respond more effectively to local environmental problems, opportunities and needs. It asked the Organizational Effectiveness Committee and the BEC Campaign Committee to think creatively, outside the box, in testing new ideas, but to avoid approaches that would create new layers of bureaucracy or make it harder for volunteers to get involved in doing the real work of environmental protection. HOW IT MIGHT WORK What kinds of things did the Board envisage Community Teams as getting involved in? · Quick, simple activities that involve friends, family and neighbors and give them the sense that they are making a difference, that bring people together in conversation and shared activity. · Events that promote dialogue, including neighborhood or community discussions · Local events and projects that give the Club visibility and community standing · Activities that show the Club working to improve communities and neighborhoods · Activities that emphasize on-to-one communication and outreach We will expect the BEC organizing sites to create these kinds of Community Teams. We do not expect that this model will be appropriate or will work for every Group or Chapter. But we do not want the Organizing Team model to be limited to BEC organizing sites, and we would encourage any Club program which has organizing resources to experiment with and if it works, adopt this model for their own work. Exactly how should these teams be set up and integrated with the Chapter and Group structures? Those questions need to be answered by testing several models, finding out which work best, and involving a broad cross-section of the Club’s volunteer leaders in evaluating the results and deciding what the eventual answers should look like. The Board understood that in some places Groups may be sufficiently local that they are already well equipped to do these kinds of activities, and can provide leadership roles in the community for as many volunteers as they can recruit. It also understood that in some places Groups may be so weak that, in the absence of a major investment of nationally funded organizing support, the priority needs to be developing the existing Group structure. But the Board also concluded that the experience with BEC suggested we had a huge potential at the neighborhood level if we organize ourselves to take advantage of it, and provide resources to support it. Given that in ten cities alone we added 12,000 new volunteers, it appears that in these, and other metropolitan areas like them, investing in Community Teams (or whatever final title we select after the testing phase) can dramatically increase the number of volunteers working on Club projects, strengthen the Club’s reputation and power in the local community, and do a better job of developing demand for environmental renewal. The process of building Community Teams will involve testing new ideas, making mistakes, finding better ways, adjusting our approaches – just as the process of building first our Chapter, and then our Group structure did. And just as Chapters organized groups at different times and in different ways, and some have no Groups even today, the Community Team concept will need to be applied in different ways in different places, and perhaps not at all in some places. But finding an effective way to get more local, and to maintain the involvement of thousands of new volunteers, we believe that the Sierra Club can best rise to the environmental challenge of the 21st century. __________________________________________________________